Our purpose is to make an empirical study of the relations between economic development and democratization in East Asia, synthesizing the social, political and economic aspects.In Korea and Thailand, economic development under the "developmentalist regimes" led to social pluralism and accerelated the processess of political liberalization and democratization.During the rapid economic development, both Korea and Thailand experienced the evolution of so-called "new middle class".The military regimes in these two countries had to step down when the broad based coalition were built up between the new middle classes and students/intellectuals.In Taiwan too, remarkable economic development finally made an end of single party dominance, through the introduction of multi party election.In contrast, the de facto single party dominance in Singapore does not show any sign of fundamental changes, Indonesia also provides an interesting case, which is quite different from the experiences of Thailan
… Mored.The new middle class do not show strong political interest.Instead they are oriented towards cultural and religious activities.The Phillippines shows fundamental differences from East Asian neighbors.Neither democratic regimes and the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos, which in our opinion did not meet the conditions of developmentalist regime, failed economic development.The most important element explaining this failure is the land ownership structure.When we focus the attention on the effect of democratization on economic development, a notable case is found in the post-war-era Japan.In other parts of East Asia, while recent democratization coexists with remarkable economic development, it is not easy to find enough evidence of logical relationship between them.A central message of our study is the diversity in the mutual relations between economic development and democratization, which depends on the country conditions.民主的改革によって、広範な国民の積極的な参加を得、経済発展が推進された典型的な例は戦後の日本であった。例えば、農地改革によって抑圧された農民意識は高まり、農業生産力は飛躍的に増大した。旧地主の根強い反対運動があったが、GHQの「外圧」によって、地主的土地所有は解体された。東アジアでも民主化と経済発展が平行しているが、因果関係を見出すことは必ずしも容易ではない。以上の通り、本研究では東アジアの国々の経済の発展と民主化へのプロセスが、それぞれの国のおかれている環境条件によって異なっていることを明らかにした。ミャンマーや中国をはじめ、なお多くの国々で経済と民主化の動向が注目されているが、本研究で明らかにされた東アジアの事例が示唆するところは少なくないであろう。 Less